The design of complex artifacts is essentially an evolutionary process that requires collaboration among stakeholders. Domain-oriented design environments (DODEs) support the evolution of artifacts both by individual designers and by designers participating in longterm, indirect collaboration. DODEs provide representations for generic and specific levels of context. This context supports individual designers by making the information space relevant to the current design intent, and longterm collaboration among designers by allowing them to ground their communication around design artifacts. We demonstrate our approach using the KID (Knowing-inDesign) system, articulate principles for representations of context and intent, and discuss various approaches to represent intent and context in design environments. KEYWORDS: domain-oriented design environments, shared context, explicit representations for intent, communication of intent, evolution of design artifacts, knowledge-based information delivery, long-term indirect collaboration